Networks and user equipment, such as smart phones and the like, are gradually changing the characteristics of mobile traffic. There are increasingly more and more applications at the user equipment requiring so-called always-on type of connections to a serving application in the network. This trend gives rise to a number of challenges both in the radio access network load as well as in the user equipment. For example, the network may have issues with signaling load and radio resource usage caused by a large number of connected user equipment or these user equipment changing state between connected and the more power/resource efficient idle mode. And, the user equipment including the so-called always-on applications may also generate traffic when unattended. For example, user equipment, such as a smart phone, may include an always-on application, such as a social networking application, a voice over internet protocol (IP) application, a location service application, and the like, may generate traffic even when not in active use. This so-called “background” traffic from these applications may include one of more packets (or bursts of packets) of relatively small size, which may be sent intermittently. This kind of background traffic may include polling messages between the application at the user equipment and a serving application in the network, keep-alive messages between the application at the user equipment and a serving application in the network, status updates between the application at the user equipment and a serving application in the network, update queries between the application at the user equipment and a serving application in the network, or anything that the application (or operating systems hosting the application) may send to the network when the user equipment hosting the application is not actively being used.